Delightful Night
It’s rather stormy tonight. Whitecaps curl, plunge,
and smash against granite, while coastal fog glows
in oncoming headlights. Cannery Row practically
a ghost town until the tourists return tomorrow.
This is one of those slick winter nights when I can
cannibalize. I’m a leviathan on the hunt, out after
egregious jackhammers destroying our monuments.
I seek respite from the kleptocratic mumbo jumbo.
There is a certain kind of pain, a dross that invades
the likes of those tiny baby white bats known
to quiver, huddled together, and in total darkness
bursting clear through time’s barriers, its hymen.
- Thomas Piekarski
Failing You
Your scream, daughter,
the morning you found me floored,
never leaves me.
I can do nothing here:
open my beak when the woman in white
pushes four tablets into my mouth,
open my beak the times when you, daughter,
present lovingly-made home-cooks on a spoon.
After visiting hours
I look out the window:
all Fibre Optics – Santa and Snowmen
and further up
the gradient of city lights stretching.
I stretch in the bed again, daughter,
await your morning visit.
- Noel King